Objective

The CentOS is primarily used in many of the atlab projects. Usually we need to perform some additional configuration or installation steps to setup our development environment. For example CentOS by default installs OpenJDK, whereas we may want to use Sun JDK in our projects. This page is intended to document such custom installation and configuration steps for CentOS.

Installing GUI - Gnome and X-window

• The minimal kickstart install does not come with GUI desktop environment. Following is a command to install X Window System and Gnome Desktop Environment:

  yum groupinstall "X Window System" "GNOME Desktop Environment" 
  

• List of package groups

  yum grouplist
  

• To get info on particular package group

  yum groupinfo <pkg-grp-name>
  

• To change your run level to GUI with X windows system:

  init 5
  

For more info on system run levels refer to CentOS doc site.

Java- JDK 6 install

Download JDK from the Sun website: http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp#jdk . Save JDK in the /var/tmp directory. Extract it to /usr/java location by executing the bin.

sh /path_to/jdk-6u7-linux-i586-rpm.bin

Verify installation:

java -version
javac -version

Create a symbolic link to point out to correct JDK.

ln -s /usr/java/default /usr/java/jdk

Configure the user environment to define the Ant path. Create and add following lines to the /etc/profile.d/java.sh .

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/jdk
export PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH

Apache ant install

Do not install ant using yum (CentOS repository) as you may get errors like:

ant -version
/usr/bin/build-classpath: error: Could not find xml-commons-apis Java extension for this JVM
/usr/bin/build-classpath: error: Some specified jars were not found
Apache Ant version 1.6.5 compiled on January 6 2007

Download ant binary from GA-Tech mirror site:

cd /var/tmp
wget http://www.gtlib.gatech.edu/pub/apache/ant/binaries/apache-ant-1.7.1-bin.tar.gz 
cd /opt
tar -xzf /var/tmp/apache-ant-1.7.1-bin.tar.gz
ln -s apache-ant-1.7.1 ant

Configure the user environment to define the Ant path. Create the file /etc/profile.d/ant.sh .

export ANT_HOME=/opt/ant
export PATH=$ANT_HOME/bin:$PATH